Guild: The Breakfast Club

17Sep

There’s a new guild in town, and it’s called The Breakfast Club. It was started by a group of five people who got together originally when MOTiE was created, who decided that we might as well also start up a twinking guild. I happen to enjoy PvP, so I agreed to doing it and offered to lead the guild as well since I had more PvP experience than everyone else.

To give you a quick definition of what twinking actually is, it’s basically obtaining the best gear you can get along with the best enchantments you can find for said gear, and using that to make the most powerful low-level character you can. A lot of the gear you get from Dungeons, some from turning in PvP rewards of honor or marks, some from quests (usually higher level quests that you get a high level character to run you through), and some you might get from turning in badges or shards for BoA gear from your high level main character.

While there is such a thing as a PvE twink, people don’t usually bother with that because if you are constantly leveling and progressing through the game then you are constantly having to replace your gear as well. The majority of twinks are PvP twinks who focus on a single level bracket. In our case, that bracket is currently level 19.

Meet the TeamGuild Master
Ibewaffles (Tauren Druid 19)
– soon to move up into the 29 bracket to heal in Arathi Basin as well

Some of these guys were brought in while I was not logged in and I haven’t seen them since, or they are players that play during hours that I do not. Looking at the roster last night we have quite a few more that aren’t on the list here, but since many of them are still below level 10 as the players focus more on their main characters, I cannot look them up on the armory or like sites to find all of their names now.

Recent Twink ChangesTurning Off Experience Gains
With the launch of 3.2 players are able to turn off their experience gains so that their character can stay at a given level indefinitely. This allows twink players who previously could not run instances or do quests without leveling their character up to do so. Along with that change was one to battlegrounds, where players who have turned off their experience only fight others who have done the same, so there is essentially a Twink battleground, and a non-twink Battleground.

Despite the theoretical existence of two different types of battlegrounds, the reality is that you will still face twinks in the non-twink battlegrounds due to the amount of experience rewarded being so small, and you will still face non-twinks in the twink battlegrounds because there are players who plan on twinking but have not bothered to get their gear or enchants yet even though they are in the bracket with you. The biggest difference that you see is that non-twink battlegrounds have a significantly shorter queue time on average than the twink battlegrounds do.

“Nerfing” Enchants
Another recent change, that’s been around for a few months now, is that a lot of the enchants that people used to abuse to make their twinks more powerful are now unavailable to them because Blizzard made two changes. First, they put level requirements on enchants so that you can no longer get some enchants for lower level brackets that you used to. In the past, if you had a high level character, a fair amount of gold, and an excess of time, you could have a twink that was pretty well unbeatable by anyone who did not match your level of devotion to twinking.

In addition to putting level requirements on some enchants, they also made it so that some of the other enchant-type items that you received became soulbound when you enchant them. Previously you were able to get head enchanting items on your high level character and then use it on your twink, but this no longer works as the enchanting item is bound to the high level character and whatever item you use it on becomes bound to you as well.

Time Limit
The most controvertial change of them all is the 25 minute time limit that has been placed on Warsong Gulch (WSG). Along with that change was one that says in the case of a tie whoever captured the first flag wins the game. When the time limit was first introduced it was only 20 minutes, which passed by so quickly that basically whoever captured the first flag won. Prior to this change, there was no time limit at all which presented its own problems.

People complained a great deal about the time limit and Blizzard responded by giving us an extra 5 minutes. That’s not a whole lot of extra time, but those five minutes do help a lot more than you would think. Before the time limit was introduced people did what we call “Turtling”, where they capture a flag and then pull most of their players around the flag carrier to defend them for however long they feel is necessary. In some cases you would turtle to prevent your team from losing, in some cases you would do it to give your own team time to recapture your own flag, and in the horror stories it was done so that the team doing the turtling could go and farm honor from their opponents for as long as they wanted.

Turtling
Turtling is not much of an option now that there is a time limit though you do still see it. When the time limit was first introduced people turtled because they were used to it. After a few days it pretty well disappeared for the most part because people were rushing to do as much as possible within the time limit. Here recently though turtling has been reintroduced by whichever team captures the first flag as they try to win with a single capture instead of trying to win the game as intended by being the first team to capture three flags.

The sad thing is, turtling is effective. If the other team doesn’t pull together a solid team to come crack down on your flag carrier then you’re probably going to win so long as you had the first flag cap. It doesn’t show that you have any skill in PvP or in being a twink, it just shows that sometimes simple math proves itself in that nine people can kill two faster than the two can kill one with however many healers standing around him.

The flip side of turtling is that it can easily cost you the game, especially if you capped the first flag but your opponent capped the second and you’re now tied. Your team turtles to score a win because you capped the first flag, and meanwhile the other team does the same thing while continuing to send a couple of small groups at you one at a time. Your team keeps up the defense because they think they’re effective and shutting down the enemy assaults.

What’s really happening here is the opponent is sending those groups in to find out what each person of your team is doing and what they’re capable of. They’re also running the clock down to nothing. They want to find who all can heal and what kind of damage your flag carrier can take while also getting used to a pattern so that you defend against an attack every 2 minutes. You fall into the habit taking out the group then sitting down to eat and drink and getting caught up on the TV show next to you. Suddenly you find out the other seven people sitting just a few yards away pop their trap and completely own your face using crowd control on your healers and everyone else focusing fire strictly on the flag carrier. Your guy dies, the enemy recaps their flag and then caps yours as well for a 2-1 victory with no time left on the clock.

The ones that came in on offense tend to kill whoever they can while not bothering to heal themselves during that time, hoping to get a small amount of honor before you save them a trip back home. That’s right, they want to get killed, they just don’t want it to seem to easy. Because the next step in this process is a mad rush by your team to cap a second flag so that the score can be tied again with your team winning from having the first cap. The problem is, you just killed off all of their attackers allowing them to resurrect right back at their base so that they can meet your sad little rush with a brutal defense. Congratulations, you just got owned.

My Thoughts
For the most part these changes are good because it allows more people to join the mix and have a chance at twinking. In some cases the changes are “bad” and have driven players away (mostly talking about things like the head enchants there), but I leave bad in quotes there because it’s not necessarily a bad thing in my opinion.

Turtling sucks, and anybody who decides to do it or participate in it sucks too. It’s a valid strategy and it does technically win you a match if done correctly, but if I see my own team turtling I will intentionally let enemy players bypass me to go after my flag carrier instead and I will not help in defending them. I’m there for a fight and a challenge, not to see who has the thickest shell. I will certainly help defend my flag carrier in normal play, but once it becomes a turtle I want no part of it. In the examples above of good turtles gone bad I will not defend my flag carrier, but I will serve my team by killing the EFC instead. I do want to win, I just don’t want to do it via some pansy tactic like turtling.

The Breakfast Club: Start your day off right – go kill some Alliance!
So far none of the premades that we have done have faced off against premades from other servers. So while we generally dominate when we’re together, we have had an unfair advantage in doing that so far compared to our opponents.

Despite the lack of opposing premade groups, there are a lot of very experienced twinks in our battlegroup that present a wonderful challenge and provide us with opportunities to learn and grow in our own skills and strategies.

Though we are not a big guild and we are not focused solely on PvP (the guild is, but the players aren’t), I think this guild has been successful in doing what it set out to do and we have a blast when we get together and face off against the other players.

The Blog
I have no intention of turning this blog into a source for Twink information. I created the blog to be a source of information for leveling your characters, and that’s how it’s going to stay. I might start up a second blog to house twink-related information, but I’m not in too much of a hurry to do that if I do it at all. I would not be surprised if a bit of twinkage shows up from time to time on the Notebook, but don’t expect the blog’s focus to change.

Out of every aspect of World of Warcraft that I have participated in, I find that PvP presents the most challenge in the game. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the hardest part of the game, or even the most fun, just that it gives me the most challenge. There’s an extra level of excitement when rushing into the unknown of facing other people who are capable of making their own decisions on the fly that you can’t find get from facing a raid boss who follows a preprogrammed course of actions.

Despite all of that, I still find leveling characters to be the most enjoyable and most rewarding experience overall. For the best flavor overall though, it’s a nice mix of all of the above.